July brought the heat to many cities across the world, so we at Microsoft thought we’d bring a little heat of our own via SharePoint and related tech updates that rolled out this month. This is the all-inclusive recap plus the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: July 2019 podcast episode – the bonus monthly audible companion to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?"

To answer that question, listen and scroll below (info, links and screenshots galore) to stay informed on what features and updates arrived this past month - plus a few teasers of what's to come:

In this podcast episode, I, too, talk with Lauren Khoo (LinkedIn | Twitter), program manager on the Microsoft OneDrive engineering team who focuses OneDrive app for iOS and keeping people productive while on the go. We discuss the new OneDrive app for iOS redesign, the approach behind it and a few teasers of what will come next. Take this podcast and hear Lauren share how she and team are focused on making you productive on the go. And …. Go! 🚶‍:female_sign:🚶‍:male_sign::studio_microphone:

Lauren Khoo, program manager (OneDrive/Microsoft) [Intrazone guest]

All the features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of July 2019 (possibly early August 2019).

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences

Build your modern intranet on SharePoint in Office 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic and welcoming nature of your intranet.

SharePoint page/news authoring improvements

Refinements keep coming – simply to make it easier to create beautiful, consumable news and pages, with numerous new options for authors. Create your page or news article to best share durable, mixed-media information to your team or across the enterprise. Let’s look at the five new updates:

Drag and drop files to the canvas. SharePoint authors will be able to upload images to the Canvas using drag and drop. SharePoint will automatically add the file viewer and upload the file to the document library.

Link preview. We’ve also added a rich preview for links pasted into the text editor to embed videos from Stream and YouTube links or images with title and description from other links.

On-page anchors. SharePoint will support anchor links, which allow readers to jump to a specific part of the page.

Undo/Redo. SharePoint authors will have the option to undo changes prior to saving or publishing.

SharePoint Communication sites will have an out-of-the box footer control, which the Site owner can control using the Change the look panel or by using PowerShell [FooterEnabled]. The site footer supports following elements: 8 links or labels, logo and name.

SharePoint site footer with a logo (Contoso Electronics in above example), with additional labels and links.

The Site usage page in SharePoint sites received an improved user experience to showcase new "Unique Visitors" and "Site Visits" charts. There, too, is a new chart titled "Popular Platforms" where users can check the platform-type (Desktop, Mobile web, Mobile app, Tablet) to analyze where traffic from to better tailor their sites.

SharePoint site usage pages display information that shows how users interact with the site.

Go to the "gear" icon on a SharePoint site and then click "Site Usage" and check it out.

Altogether, on a Site usage page - you'll see insights about Unique viewers, Site visits, Site traffic (aka, heatmap), Popular Platforms, Most unique viewers, Most viewed, and Shared with external users.

Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – and is integrated with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.

360-degree image previewer

2D is so 2018. 2019 is all about visualizing in 3D. Customers will be able to view 360-degree photos in an interactive, panoramic manner, directly within SharePoint and OneDrive; photos truly come alive.

This preview integrates external sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive with Azure AD B2B. This includes external sharing of files, folders, list items, document libraries and sites. With this integration turned on, when a user shares an item in SharePoint or OneDrive with an external user then a Guest account is immediately created for that external user (if one does not already exist). As a result, any sign-in or conditional access policies in place in your organization will take effect on those external users.

You can opt-in to the preview, and if not, this roll out does not affect you.

These improvements will allow users to easily edit their metadata by enabling new features within the Quick Edit mode such as filtering content, dragging and dropping column widths, showing all view and column formatting, and improved user/choice field type support.

In SharePoint, open the list to edit, and then edit several items in the Quick edit view.

Many documents may be part of an approval workflow. Starting soon, you can select multiple items and decide to either approve or reject them together. To use this new feature, you can select multiple items and then “Approve/reject” all in one motion. You, too, can add optional comments into the Flow and out to associated stakeholders.

On a SharePoint list or library, select multiple items and select “Approve/reject” – and then decide to approve or reject the content and add optional comments.

A new 30-day grace period for the release of SharePoint Online holds prevents the hold from being immediately released. During the grace period, any deleted item will continue to be preserved in the preservation library and items will not be deleted from this location until the hold is removed.

Preservation Hold Library items are now moved to the “Second Stage Recycle Bin” before being purged to allow admins to recover for a short time period before items are purged.

General flow of content into a preservation hold library when a SharePoint site collection enables a retention policy.

These two new capabilities of the SharePoint preservation hold library help protect customers from inadvertent data loss.

Related technology

Outlook on the web - new cloud doc sharing experience

Outlook on the web is updating how you share cloud docs from OneDrive and SharePoint. Now when you paste a link for a OneDrive or SharePoint file in a message, it will replace it with the name of the file and the corresponding Office app icon. That link will also allow you to manage permissions for the file using a new sharing dialogue.

Paste a link for a OneDrive or SharePoint file in a message in Outlook for the Web and it will replace it with the name of the file and the corresponding Office app icon.

This is a broad design overhaul to the OneDrive mobile app. We are excited to begin pushing out the refreshed look and feel of the OneDrive app for iOS. We, too, are updating how you work with recent files, annotate PDFs, link to files via Outlook mobile and more.

Use the OneDrive app for iOS to create and edit documents, scan receipts and business cards, markup and annotate PDFs, chat and co-author Office documents and share content with your peers.

Here is a summary of the collective update to the OneDrive app for iOS:

Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – July 2019 (blog/podcast). We’re open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.

Engage with us. Ask questions. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We're here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.

Stay safe out there in space and on the roadmap -- and thanks for listening and reading.

It would be really interesting for our customers to have a simple customization solution via JS & CSS code injection like the classic version (webpart content & script) and to be able to modify the code of the master page directly